Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

This Advisor presents results from a recent study that investigates how humility and narcissism affect CEO behavior. With a sample of 190 CEOs and data collected from interviews and public sources, the author introduces a set of diverse CEO archetypes by measuring humility, narcissism, and entrepreneurial status.

Ananthi Al Ramiah, Gretchen Reydams-Schils, and Matthew Phillips focus on the crisis of purpose within professions. Premised on purpose to begin with, many professions are struggling with inner distress and outer distrust. Instead of taking purpose for granted, the authors invite professionals to work on it by employing four Stoic virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance). Quoting philosopher Christopher Gill, who describes virtue as “expertise in leading a happy life,” the authors encourage purpose-driven professionals to reimagine themselves at the center of circles opening up to progressively widening communities, so they can ask how to take setbacks seriously, defy indifference, and reify the joy of tackling what matters most.

Andriy Rozhdestvensky, Sofiya Opatska, and Gerard Seijts (coauthor of Character: What Contemporary Leaders Can Teach Us About Building a More Just, Prosperous, and Sustainable Future) move us to extraordinary purpose, counting up to the 1,000 days of Ukraine’s resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. “How can societal leaders come to terms with the damage inflicted on them and then make the substantive shift of returning to a peacetime leadership approach equipped to rebuild and regenerate the country?” the authors ask. The article features hard-won insights from five resilient Ukrainian leaders (from parliament, the armed forces, church, business, the not-for-profit sector, and academia) who open up about their journey to, and undeniable power of, existential purpose.

Christian Busch, author of The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, and Nele Terveen explain how purpose helps leaders connect the dots between grand challenges and strategic responses. When leaders expect the unexpected, the authors explain, they incent their stakeholders to embrace uncertainty so they can better guide their organizations through adversity and disruption. By leveraging the five practices of Serendipitous Impact (impact mission, impact leadership, impact governance, impact networks, and impact measurement) unexpected events can help leaders come up with solutions that often cannot be seen, let alone fully defined, in advance.

Frank Jan de Graaf invites us to try on deliberative practices. Firmly rooted in pragmatism, deliberation has historically played a significant (some say central) role in democratic societies. It also comes in handy when opposite perspectives invite us to summon new ways to converse about issues that matter — but matter differently to each of us. Rather than bracing against those who don’t share a particular purpose, de Graaf advocates for open dialogue, so we begin to look beyond the current divides and discover integrative ways to develop new rules of engagement, frame new responsibilities, and discover new solutions.

Kanina Blanchard coaches leaders on how to recognize, resist, and redirect deviance from purpose. Her article reminds us that asking questions that matter is more an art than a science. It takes us behind the scenes, where vulnerability often makes otherwise brave leaders shy away (and sometimes stay away) from probing their everyday. Blanchard meets them there, offering the empathy and humility required to get at some of those important, if often unasked, questions: “Why not?”; “What if?”; “Where else?”; “How otherwise?”

How far forward can hardship take purpose-driven leaders? Lara Liboni, Luciana O. Cezarino, Alessandro Goulart, Vera Goulart, and Rafael Petry offer a real-life case of success created from adversity. Before there was a solution, they tell us, there was a problem. This problem was so big, they insist, that it instigated purpose, which then inspired many stakeholders to partner for “Symbiotic Impact.” Unlike serendipity, where chance encounters enabled previously unimagined opportunities, the Symbiosis Project carefully crafted first-of-their-kind collaborations to systematically undo barriers keeping marginalized youth from accessing higher education and being employed in competitive sectors.

Vanessa M. Patrick, author of The Power of Saying No: The New Science of How to Say No That Puts You in Charge of Your Life, and Murali Kuppuswamy explain how saying no can be an essential antidote to purpose washing. Leveraging insights on empowered refusal, the authors suggest that by exemplifying no, leaders not only reaffirm their own purpose, they permit everyone else to uphold theirs. Their piece reminds us that at the core of any type of “washing” lies our timidity in spotting and combating deviance from purpose. Purpose can only be washed, it turns out, when leaders like us don’t say no when we ought to.